ABSTRACT
Feeding a world population of well over 9 billion without significantly expanding the land area devoted to agriculture is one of the greatest challenges in this century. Apart from the dramatic increase in global food and feed demand, there is also a rapidly growing demand for non-food, non-feed agro-industrial products for applications spanning many sectors — industry, chemicals and energy. Meeting this demand will be a great test for human ingenuity to drastically increase the productivity on the fertile soils already in production, without causing land degradation. Climate change, water resource scarcity, increased climate variability and geopolitical uncertainties are however already today limiting agricultural production at a global scale. The era of plentiful and under-priced resources is hence slowly coming to an end and agricultural land, biodiversity, terrestrial, aquatic and marine ecosystems and corresponding ecosystem services are under increasing pressure (UNEP, 2014). A key question is therefore how humanity will meet a future massive bioresource demand in a resource-efficient, climate-smart and sustainable manner.
